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miércoles, 15 de mayo de 2013

Reviewing: Cthulhu by Gaslight

Go
get it! End of the review. No, really, if you are going to spend 30 bucks this
year on Chaosium I think this is it (even when “House of R’lyeh” seems
promising…). Now, lets get serious and
try to explain why I think this is such a good book.

First
of all, you might need to know a little bit of my personal background. I find
Victorian England a fascinating period of history; “Dreadnought” from Robert K.
Maisse is the best History book I have ever read (true, I have not read that
many) and Sherlock Holmes is the hero of my youth. If you add that there has
never been a Spanish edition of “Gaslight” (even when “Dark Designs” was
actually translated) you can probably understand why I was so excited when I
saw that Chaosium was going to reedit this sourcebook.

Since
I do not have any of the previous two editions, I cannot compare them with the
new one, but from what I have read, they have rewritten it substantially,
meaning that it might be a good purchase even if you do have one of the older
versions. Visually it is an excellent book (again, the people from Aventuras enla Marca del Este have a very good photo-review of this book), proving that it
is still possible to edit a fine black and white book, now that it seems almost
mandatory to publish in color (another question is if whether or not you should
get a color book for 30 bucks). Pictures are usually really good, no matter whether
they imitate pictures from the era or not, watermarks are beautiful yet it is
easy to read the text over it and the titles are written in a very attractive
way (nothing to do with those of “Atomic-Age Cthulhu”). But if we wanted just
nice art we would have got a different kind of book, so what is in “Cthulhu by
Gaslight?”

“Part
I: Victorian Characters” (23 pages) teaches us how to create investigators for
this particular era. It includes professions, skills, weapons and other
equipment, aside from a vocabulary of Victorian slang. It also includes traits
that we can use to add some flavor to our investigators, but for me the most
interesting part of this section is how social class affects the interaction
between PCs and NPCs, so think it twice before creating a Marxist trade
unionist ;)

“Part
II: The Victorian World” (48 pages) fills the reader with interesting and
useful information about 1890’s England: The Empire, the Army, London…I
particularly enjoyed the Bibliography section, which gives a paragraph about several
important individuals of the time such as Conan Doyle, Gladstone or Wilde, but
there are also sections about transport, media, crime, the British government
(very useful for those of us who are not from there), clubs or universities. It
is an excellent section, truly a brief “how was life in Victorian England” that
will help players and Keepers alike to run proper Victorian stories without throwing
themselves into hours of research.

“Part
III, Strange Britain” (36 pages) starts explaining some of the main occult groups from the era: The
Theosophical Society, the Freemasons, The Golden Dawn, Spiritualists, and The
Society for Psychical Research. After reading this, it looks to me that the
occult during the Victorian era was more mainstream that underground and if you
wanted to be someone in the world, you had to be a member of one of these
societies (remember the biographies from Part II? well, many of them are part
of the occult world). If nothing else, you can always make the investigators
members of these societies and use the latter as backups, sources of
information… The section continues with a gazetteer of strange places of the
British Isles. In my option, there is too little information about each place
to be actually useful but I tend to be the lazy kind of Keeper. There are also a few pages on the Mythos
entities of Britain, a compendium of NPCs and a few ideas on how to run
Victorian scenarios. Aside from the aforementioned occult societies
description, I think one of the best parts of this section are the biographies
about fictional characters from the era, from Sherlock Holmes to the Martians
from “The War of the Worlds”. Sure it is a delicate aspect and it might end up
giving a very pulp feeling to your adventures (can you say pulp referring to
the Victorian era?), but if you are brave enough, it can lead to memorable
scenarios.

“Part
IV Gaslight Adventures” (49 pages) gives us two scenarios “The Night of the
Jackals” and “The Burnt Man”. Both of them are very good stories with two very
distinct environments. Without getting into too much detail (in order to avoid
spoilers), the first one it is a classic investigation in misty London, with
veterans of the Sudan Campaign that were not as honorable as expected while the
second one takes place in a manor house in Dartmoor (the same sparsely
populated area where “The Hound of the Baskerville” takes place), curse
included.

The
book finishes with a very useful appendix of suggested books (fiction, non
fiction, mythos, non mythos, RPGs) and movies, aside from the mandatory
handouts for the two adventures.

In
summary, an excellent sourcebook that should have a place in even the smallest
“Call of Cthulhu” bookshelf. I am sure it is possible to run a good Victorian
adventure without this book, but I can also guarantee that even if you are not
planning to run any such adventure, you will still find this book a fine
reading.